Friday, February 17, 2017

KStars 2.7.4 for Windows is released!

Glad to announce the release of KStars v2.7.4 for Windows 64bit. This version is built a more recent Qt (5.8) and the latest KF5 frameworks for Windows bringing more features and stability.

This release brings in many bugs fixes, enhancements for limited-resources devices, and improvements, especially to KStars premier astrophotography tool: Ekos. Windows users would be glad to learn that they can now use offline astrometry solver in Windows, thanks to the efforts of the ANSVR Local Astrometry.net solver. The ANSVR mimics the astrometry.net online server on your local computer; thus the internet not required for any astrometry queries.

After installing the ANSVR server and downloading the appropriate index files for your setup, you can simply change the API URL to use the ANSVR server as illustrated below:

In Ekos align module, keep the solver type to Online so it would use the local ANSVR server for all astrometry queries. Then you can use the align module as you would normally do. This release also features the Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant tool, a very easy to use spot-on tool to polar align your mount.